- Joined
- Apr 2, 2023
Viv's vision of Hell makes a lot more sense if you see it for what it is; Halloween Town for "grownups".This actually sums up the point I was trying to make earlier way more clearly. Viv is obsessed with the idea of heaven and hell for some strange reason, but doesn't actually want to write about what heaven and hell would "realistically" be. That's why her version of hell is so watered down to basically remove the majority of the bad elements, like no racists/bigots/child molesters etc. There''s a couple of villainous characters, but they really seem to be the exception to the rule. There's some violence, but it's very cartoony and hard to tell if it's supposed to really be taken seriously or more just played for laughs. But otherwise, hell is more or less a safe space for the faggy characters to exist.
It isn't even just that hell has all the bad elements stripped down, but a lot of the interesting elements are gone, like having a bunch of different people from various cultures/time periods interacting with one another. Heaven seems equally stripped down, with little thought put into how paradise functions, what someone has to do to get into Heaven, who decides, where's God etc. While not everyone we see in Heaven is outright evil, it largely exists as an oppressive force for our plucky gay underdog heroes to ultimately overcome and defeat.
In Viv's eyes, hell is the cool rebellious teenager that society just doesn't understand, and heaven is "the man" that has to be overthrown. And on paper, those concepts are fine, I bet 10 years ago if I saw a cartoon like that on adult swim, my teenage self would have loved it and praised it as being deep and profound and laughed at all the people saying fuck a bunch. But it sounds like what really drew a lot of people in is the setting, which Viv completely fails to utilize in any meaningful way.
That's why I think the simplest way to save the show is change Heaven to a massive city/dimension/whatever called Utopia. It's a high-society place where only good people are accepted by the council. Once you turn 18 or 21 or whatever age they decide, you're judged on whether you get to stay, or you're banished to into the wastes, which is also where any criminal offenders go. They're considered subhuman, and the upper class in Utopia pull a purge every year under the guise of quelling the population, but it's just those jerkish rich characters looking for an excuse to beat up the gay lower class. It's in no way a unique premise, but it's more honest about who the target audience is/the overall goal of the show.
A lot of posts here keep suggesting ways the setting could be improved by changing it completely, but frankly the setting just isn't the problem. I think Viv's Nightmare Before Christmas version of Hell could work as-is if she could focus her energies. The story shoots off in so many different directions that it's impossible to be consistent.
Is Hazbin a story about Satan's daughter helping souls damned to Hell to find redemption? Is it a story about the conflict between Heaven and Hell and the incoherence of a system that not even Heaven understands? Is it a glorified self-RP sesh where Viv gets to smash her dollies together while making kissy sounds? Viv wants HH to be all of these at the same time, which a talented writer could pull off, but if she was a talented writer this thread would probably be a lot shorter.